Page 63 of Score
I take her wrist and gently touch theSOStattooed across the scar from her first suicide attempt. I have a matchingSOStattoo on my wrist—theOshaped into a heart—woven into the scars from the glass I shattered breaking into the fine arts building. We got them together as a covenant of sorts, a promise that one will always come running if the other is in trouble.
“SOS, baby.” I sniff. “And you better come if I call.”
“I probably can’t afford the flight to Cali, but maybe I’ll get a sugar daddy just so I can be prepared.”
“Youbeenwanting a sugar daddy.” I huff a laugh. “Don’t use me as an excuse.”
“’Tis true.” She looks off into the distance, her expression turning wistful. “Maybe a silver fox with a big bank account and an even bigger dick.”
“Oh God,” my other roommate, Melissa, a beautiful curvy Peruvian woman who thinks she’s our mom, says when she enters the room. “Is she talking about that sugar daddy again?”
“You know she is.” I grin and hook my arm around Mel’s neck, bringing her into our group hug. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”
“There you go getting all mushy on me.” Mel grins, squirming away to plop on the couch we rescued from the sidewalk and thoroughly sanitized. “It’s your last night in the city, and we have something good planned.”
“Oh yeah?” I fall onto the couch beside Mel. “Like what?”
“There’s a stoop party in Harlem,” Mel says, eyes wide in anticipation.
“And there’s supposed to be this fantastic band,” Tessa chimes in. “Good music, good food, horny niggas everywhere. You in?”
“Hell yeah.” I glance down at the grubby jeans and T-shirt I wore to work today. “Guess I should change, huh?”
“Um, yeah.” Tessa gives my outfit a quietly horrified once-over. “You ain’t going nowhere with me looking thrown away.”
“Says the woman who wears cold cuts for a living.” I squeal when she bops me on the head with a couch cushion. “I’m just saying, glass houses, boo.”
“Wear the dress from that boutique we like,” Tessa says. “It makes your ass look like a shelf.”
“Then we can hit a club on our way back.” Mel stands and slaps my backside. “And use that fat ass and perky tits of yours to get free drinks.”
God, I’m gonna miss them. I haven’t had many real friends since Finley. Just when Tessa and Mel start to feel like family, it’s time to leave. I’m not really in the mood to party, but I’ll go to get every second I can with them before I move for my fellowship.
“Okay, I’m in,” I say when we settle. “Harlem it is.”
“And Luis is coming,” Tessa singsongs, leaping to her feet and skipping around the living room. “Which means you’ll get some good dick for the road. One last bang before you go.”
“Whatever,” I sigh, and head to the bedroom. “I better get dressed.”
Luis Sanchez was a part of their friend group when I moved in. He andI eventually ventured into the friends-with-benefits zone. Lately, he’s been trying to make it more. Wanting to be exclusive. Wanting todateme. I don’t do that anymore. I may never do it again. Living with bipolar is a lot. Having to explain things, hoping they won’t be around if I have a swing in either direction, trusting them enough to accept and support me if things go off the rails sounds like more than I want to manage. I’ve been burned before; thought a girl or a guy could handle it, only to be disappointed when they realized they couldn’t or didn’t want to bother. As much as I get it, that shit hurts. It would have to really feel worth the trouble, and no one has feltthatworth it since…
Not going there.
My friends are in full turn-up mode on the subway ride, vacillating from bicker to banter the whole way to Harlem. The neighborhood still throbs with an energy that’s so distinct and rich—community, history, creativity. It lives in the air. Visiting the Apollo, walking Strivers’ Row, where so many luminaries and leaders lived, popping into Abyssinian Baptist and imagining Adam Clayton Powell’s fiery oratory from its pulpit. I’ve come here often, and being at the epicenter of so much Black artistry has inspired me. I wanted to write my final senior thesis on some aspect of the Harlem Renaissance, except I never quite made it to the senior part. Maybe I’m also drawn to it because it represents one more thing I never got closure on when I left Finley so abruptly.
I try not to think of Monk because it still hurts too much, wondering what we could have been. The wall I erect around my heart drops every once in a while, though, and the memories flood in. He managed to imprint himself on my soul in a way I fear no one else ever will. Wright Bellamy is my kryptonite. And he may not realize it, but I would be his. The intensity of our feelings, the thing that made us so good together, in the midst of one of my episodes, maybe would be the very thing that wrecks us.
I’ve stood in the burned ruins of that kind of love. Choked on its ashes.
He never reached out to me after that night, the lowest point in my life. Why would he after the way I behaved? But if he had, I would have ignored him, like I’ve ignored anyone else from that time. Too much shame. I’mnot sure how I would respond if I ever saw Monk again. Even knowing we should be oil and water, the way we mixed—body, soul, heart—haunts me.
The party reaches us before we reach the party. The smell of fish frying wafts over from a block away. I feel the swelter of bodies crammed close in the humidity of a summer night with a hundred people singing Frankie Beverly and Maze’s “Before I Let Go” like it’s their national anthem. When we round the corner, there is a mass electric slide happening in the street. Off to the side, a group gathers around several girls double-Dutching, a blur of legs and ropes as they dash in and out.
“God, I love being Black,” Tessa sighs. “Smells like shea butter, fried chicken, and resilience out here.”
I laugh and let the last of the weight from my session with Dr. Palmer lift from my shoulders.
“Let’s dance,” Luis says, tugging me into the kick and shuffle of the slide.
